Ryne Pearson - Capitol Punishment

Darian didn’t know what effect the glass would have on his shots, so he swung the Ingram back and forth as he sprayed the rounds at the pig, destroying the window and sending his target falling from view.

“SHIT!” Roger screamed, ducking, then looking in the side view mirror. “He’s still out there! He’s on the ground! He’s moving!”

Darian ejected the empty magazine and noisily dug another out of the gym bag and inserted it. He crawled over Moises and peeked through the permanently open side window just in time to see the pig disappear behind the car, crawling on his belly. A wide trail of blood marked his path. “Stay down.”

The NALF leader popped the door handle and stepped out after cautioning his comrades. Down the interstate he could see only a speck of white approaching, some distance off. But this wouldn’t take long. He edged along the car toward the rear, the stubby Ingram held forward one-handed. A raspy scraping rose from the asphalt behind the Olds, which Darian could tell was the sound of hard soles pushing off the pavement. And there was breathing, or wheezing, which came and went in short bursts. As he reached the rear quarter panel the source of both sounds became visible to Darian.

“Hold it, pig.”

Trooper Fitzroy, his face abraded and bleeding from being pushed along the roadway as his legs attempted to drive his damaged body to safety, paused at the sound, then rolled onto his back near the right front of his cruiser. He winced in pain as his shattered arms flopped with the motion of his torso. Both limbs from shoulder to elbow were red, pulpy strands that seemed strangely long. They, along with Fitzroy’s Kevlar vest, had absorbed the brunt of the submachine gun’s punishment. The trooper’s gun and radio were still in their place on his Sam Browne, useless to him.

Darian stepped closer, trying unsuccessfully to skirt the swath of blood. His thumb moved the selector switch to single shot as he leveled the weapon at the pig. “How long did you think we’d just sit back and take it, pig?”

Fitzroy’s expression became one of mixed pain and puzzlement, but no fear. He knew what was coming, whether the guy shot him or not. Too much blood was pouring from his open wounds. Too much for anything to matter anymore. “They’ll get you,” Fitzroy said confidently, his voice breathy. “Don’t worry.”

The short barrel centered on the pig’s face. “We got you first.” Darian smiled, then pulled the trigger twice, both rounds hitting true and literally exploding the top of the pig’s head, which spilled toward the lowest point on the road’s shoulder.

“Shit!” Roger yelled from the car. “There’s cars coming!”

Darian looked south, squinting past the bright spotlight that shone almost in his face. The single dots had become multiple pairs of distant headlights, and they were coming fast. He gave the patrol car a quick look from where he stood. There was no one else in it. No other pig, and no one locked in the rear seat cage. It was a clean kill. As clean as it could get.

“Come on!”

Darian heeded that call and climbed back in the Olds through the open rear door, pushing Moises over as he did. Roger dropped the car into gear even before the door shut completely and pulled into the traffic lanes with a screech of rubber worthy of Hollywood.

Trooper Fitzroy lay in front of his idling UHP cruiser for another thirty minutes before a passing fellow officer made the grisly discovery. Within twenty minutes there were over fifty state and local law enforcement personnel on-scene. The first thing they did was call for the coroner. The second was to switch off the small video camera mounted in tandem with the cruiser’s rearview mirror and remove the tape from the recorder secured in the trunk. It arrived at the Utah Highway Patrol’s Salt Lake City headquarters by helicopter twenty-two minutes after that.

A hundred and twenty hours after the first person fell in the attack on the First Interstate World Center, the core of the FBI investigative team was moving beyond the “who” to focus on the “how,” a question they believed was explained in the voluminous handwritten diaries of Canadia Conyers Royce.

“I’ll read to you,” Frankie said. Art, Hal, Omar, and Lou gave their attention as she found the first section she had marked. “Here:

December 1985,

The ‘Defender,’ last month’s issue, arrived today, and a very, very powerful piece was on page seventeen. By a man named John Barrish. I have never heard of him before, but he referred to Father’s good friend Dr. Trent in the piece. Powerful, I do say. So clearly does he describe the negro problem that I could almost overlook that annoying habit — the same one Dr. Trent had — of calling the negroes Africans. Words, words, words. This is about more than that. I must look into this John Barrish. I definitely must. ”

Frankie skipped to the next passage marked by a sticky note. “And this:

March 1986,

John is a charming man. He reminds me so much of father. Intelligent. No… wise. That is the word. And what power there is to his vision! ”

“She sounds infatuated with him,” Hal commented. “What’s that Defender reference?” Lou asked.

“It’s some quarterly white power rag put out by an old minister who acts as a sort of clearinghouse for all the groups’ writings,” Frankie explained. “And Burlingame found an interesting ad in one from three years back. Placed by some Afrikaner mercenary type who said there were, quote, ‘former East Bloc specialists eager to work for the right price,’ unquote. An interesting spin on Royce’s trip, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would say. You read all these?” Art asked, gesturing at the stacks of diaries.

“Every page.” Three solid days it had taken, holed up in a vacant office one floor up. Frankie, a diary writer herself, felt she knew Canadia Conyers Royce now, a state of familiarity that had pity and anger as tagalong emotions.

“So she read something by Barrish and…what?” Art wondered.

“This goes back further than Barrish’s piece in the Defender ,” Frankie explained, recalling the passages laid upon the yellowed pages eighty-odd years earlier. “It goes all the way back to the Civil War. Mrs. Royce’s family was originally from Charleston. Big shipping people. Her grandfather squirreled away his money in gold, and when the war started he fought for the Confederacy. He lived through it all and moved north with his booty when it was all over. But he didn’t forget his suthun ways. He was one of the original organizers of the Klan in Massachusetts, and his son — Mrs. Royce’s father — followed in his footsteps. The business Gramps had set up did well and they never hesitated to support their fellow hood-heads.”

“So Mrs. Royce had a background that lent itself to John Barrish’s way of thinking,” Art proposed.

“Step one: like ideology. Step two: contact. After she read the Defender she started corresponding with Barrish. Eventually they met, and she liked him a lot.”

“A May-December thing,” Hal suggested facetiously.

“In a way it was,” Frankie responded. “For her, at least. Women think differently, fellas. Older women like Mrs. Royce in particular. There’s a romantic sort of thing about being ‘connected’ to a younger, powerful man. And she saw John Barrish as very powerful.

“So, step three: assistance. She started giving him money for the AVO, just like her father and grandfather had done for the Klan.”

“How much altogether?” Lou inquired.

“She never said in the diaries, but she was loaded.”